June 4, 2021: The Rise of Hindu Nationalism, Islamophobia and Foreign Policy by Max Mellott
US-India relations have been on a steady upward trajectory for the last several decades, accelerating over the last five years in the face of a rising China. A curious episode during Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar’s December 2019 visit to Washington, however, reveals some of the ways that the BJP’s commitment to the project of Hindu nationalism constrain its foreign policy. Jaishankar refused to meet with Representative Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), citing her support for a resolution calling on India to respect freedom of expression in Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir and her history of statements calling for India to improve the state of human rights and religious freedom in the country.
The refusal to meet Jayapal, a key member of the majority party and one of the few Indian-American members of Congress had real consequences. House Foreign Affairs Committee chair Elliot Engel (D-NY) cancelled the committee’s meeting with Jaishankar, and it resulted in a flurry of news reports and op-eds drawing attention to India’s human rights short-comings and question the trajectory of the US-India relationship. While Jaishankar is generally considered a pragmatic, technocratic member of the Modi government, his very public stand defending the BJP government’s moves to crush dissent in Muslim-majority Kashmir reflects the centrality of Islamophobia or the ‘othering’ of Islam to the BJP’s theory of national unity and governance, which cannot be cast aside to meet its foreign policy goals.
Since the birth of a nationalist independence movement, figuring out what defines and unites Indians has been an often surprisingly difficult question to answer. Historian Ramachandra Guha identified five main axes of conflict in post-independence India: caste, language, religion, class and gender, and any ideology that seeks to govern across India needs to find a way to bridge, or at least manage, these divisions. For Hindu nationalists, looking to build a single pan-Indian Hindu identity to manage these conflicts and hold political power, Islamophobia has been central to their rise to national political power.
Othering Islam became so central because the creation of a single, unifying, Hindu identity was not something that was as obvious as it might seem and was a potentially alienating concept even for presumptive members of the Hindu nation, never mind Sikhs, Christians, Jains, Buddhists, followers of Adivasi religions, or indeed, Muslims. Among Hindus, for the hundreds of millions of low-caste or casteless people, a Hindu nation threatened to reinforce their subjugation, reversing decades of economic and political gains. For women, a Hindu nation similarly threatened to reverse growing legal, economic, and political power. Across linguistic lines, the close association of orthodox Hinduism with the Sanskrit literary cannon and modern spoken Hindi similarly threatened the status of languages like Tamil or Telugu. Furthermore, these separate axes of identity (caste, language) themselves proved to be powerful mobilizers of political support. As a result, Hindu nationalism spent decades after independence as a relatively marginalized, if internally well organized, political force.
Islamophobia, along with Hindu-themed mass media and the collapse of the Congress party’s organization, was one of the key ingredients for Hindu nationalism’s rise from the margins to the center of national power. The key event marking Hindu nationalism’s arrival as a national political force was the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, an incident of mob violence inspired, incited, and very likely directed by the institutions of the Sangh Parivar, the incarnation of institutional Hindu nationalism. The Hindu nationalist narrative emphasized Hindu suffering at the hands of foreign Muslim invaders for eight hundred years from the Ghaznavids to the Mughals, represented by the Babri Masjid, and promised that India could be returned to a supposed pre-Islamic Hindu golden age, represented by the temple to Ram to be erected in its place.
The engineered mob violence at Ayodhya presaged a rise to power for the Hindu nationalists that has consistently returned to rhetorical, legal and at times physical assaults on Muslims and other religious minorities and their membership in the Indian national community. These assaults have ranged from accusations of spreading coronavirus or using marriage to force Hindus to convert in a ‘love jihad,’ to threats to deport Muslim migrants and the revocation of the autonomy of Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only Muslim majority state, to deadly proliferation of ‘cow protection’ vigilantism and periodic episodes of mass violence, such as the 2001 Gujarat riots or the 2020 Delhi riots. Even as some leaders of the BJP have emphasized a message of economic development over social tensions, Islamophobia and assaults on minorities have rarely been more then a wink and a nod away, ready to be trotted out whenever it seems to be politically advantageous, such as during the recent state elections in West Bengal and Assam.
For the BJP’s foreign policy, these domestic necessities have important implications. India’s relationship with its Western partners, who have institutional and legal commitments to religious freedom such as the US’s International Religious Freedom Act, are likely to be consistently troubled by periodic episodes of concern and disagreement. These episodes could be quite serious. In areas like technology development and regulation that are of primary strategic importance, concerns over the way that technology is deployed to suppress dissent or target minorities might limit the depth of cooperation. When India needs to request political favors through national legislatures, it may find that it has burned precious political capital.
Even if these episodes are unlikely to derail their broader strategic alignment, they do limit the depth of possible policy cooperation, particularly in areas less directly touched by geo-strategic concerns, like education, migration, or even economic and development policy. It also means that India is unlikely to fully come around to the Western way of thinking on human rights, pitting India’s government against large swaths of Western civil society. In the context of competition with China, where airing concerns over human rights, and in particular China’s treatment of its own Muslim minority groups has become a key flashpoint, it is not clear that India and its partners in the Quadrilateral security dialogue or in Europe can see eye-to-eye.
India also has key relationships with Muslim majority-countries to worry about. For example, India enjoys strong economic and security relationships with the Persian Gulf states, based on the flow of Indian migrant workers to the Gulf and energy resources and remittances back to India. India has also collaborated closely on issues ranging from space exploration to joint military exercises. Like with the West, the logic of these economic and strategic relationships might overwhelm any concerns over religious freedom, a flurry of criticism and public outrage over the riots in Delhi targeting Muslims in the Gulf points to the limits that the BJP’s othering of Muslims places on the depth of India’s relationships to the Gulf.
Still, Islamophobia and the targeting of minority rights are not always a loser abroad. Some relationships, like India’s close defense and trade relationship with Israel, are unlikely to be significantly shaken by concerns around Islamophobia and might even be deepened as a Hindu nationalist India makes common cause based on the supposed security threat posed by Muslims. In its immediate neighborhood in its relationship with Sri Lanka, long strained by tensions between the island’s Sinhala and Tamil populations and the Buddhist Sinhala chauvinism of Sri Lanka’s government, an attempt to limit the autonomy of Muslim minorities after the Easter Bombings of 2019 represents a rare moment of narrative convergence between the two states. In these cases, and potentially others, the deep-seated othering of Islam by Hindu nationalists might actually create common ground, rather then be a source of division.
Islamophobia has been at the center of the BJP’s rise to power and the Hindu nationalist project more generally. It has been one of the movement’s most important tools to attempt to overcome the obstacles of caste division, language status and even religious differences, by identifying Hinduism with a common narrative of subjugation at the hands of Muslims followed by the restoration of a ‘lost’ Hindu golden age. This narrative cannot be easily jettisoned, and it will continue to constrain India’s foreign relationships as long as Hindu nationalism is an ascendent political force. Only when other narratives and institutions are strengthened as ways to manage India’s internal conflict can it be overcome, a task that is likely to be slow and painstaking at best.
